Jill Walker Rettberg (born Jill Walker in 1971) is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen. She is "a leading researcher in self-representation in social media" and a European Research Council grantee (2018-2023) with the project ''Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media'.'' Rettberg is known for innovative research dissemination in social media, having started her research blo
jill/txt
in 2000, and developed ''Snapchat Research Stories'' in 2017.

Education and academic career

After completing an MA in Comparative Literature at the

University of Bergen The University of Bergen ( no, Universitetet i Bergen, ) is a research-intensive state university located in Bergen, Norway. As of 2019, the university has over 4,000 employees and 18,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 194 ...

in 1998, Rettberg worked for a year on a research project developing educational

MOO A MOO ("MUD, object-oriented") is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time. The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to those programs descend ...

s, and in 2003 completed a doctoral degree in Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen under the supervision of

Espen Aarseth Espen J. Aarseth (born 1965) is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics ...

. Rettberg was hired as an associate professor at the University of Bergen after her PhD, and was promoted to full Professor of Digital Culture in 2009. In addition to her tenured position at the University of Bergen, Rettberg has been a visiting scholar at the

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology RMIT University, officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,, section 4(b) is a public university, public research university in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1887 by Francis Ormond, RMIT began as a night school offering cla ...

University of Illinois Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus established under the University of Illinois sy ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

. In addition to her academic positions, Jill Walker Rettberg is a member of the

Research Council of Norway The Research Council (also the Research Council of Norway; no, Norges forskningsråd) is a Norwegian government agency that funds research and innovation projects. On behalf of the Government, the Research Council invests NOK 11,9 billion (2021) ...

's portfolio board for Humanities and Social Sciences (2019-2023), and was previously a member of

Arts Council Norway The Arts Council Norway ( no, Norsk kulturråd, often shortened to ''Kulturrådet'') is the official arts council for Norway. Based in Oslo, it is a Norwegian state institution created in 1965 as a result of a parliamentary decision in 1964. Art ...

's research and development committee. She co-authored the official Norwegian report NOU 2013:2 on hindrances for digital growth.

Blogging and social media

With the book Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves Rettberg examined three key modes of self-representation in social media: textual, as in blogs, visual, as in selfies, and quantitative, as in self-tracking and the growing quantitative self movement. Seeing these modes in combination is key to understanding social media as a whole.

Books

* ''Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves.'' Basingbroke: Palgrave, October 2014. * ''Blogging''. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008, 2nd ed. 2014. (1st ed. trans.: Polish, Korean.) * (co-editor, with Hilde Corneliussen) D''igital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.'' Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Major grants and awards

* ERC Consolidator grant (€2 million) 2018–2023. * John Lovas Award for Best Academic Weblog for Snapchat Research Stories * The Meltzer Prize for Excellence in Research Dissemination, 2005. * The Inaugural Ted Nelson Newcomer Award at the ACM Hypertext conference in 1999.

References

External links

* Snapchat Research Stories. Archive on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL46Xs2itPIMlDBL0tPfg-2WzXwZrnTePh * jill/txt - a research blog active since 2000. https://jilltxt.net {{DEFAULTSORT:Rettberg, Jill Walker 1971 births Living people Norwegian scientists Australian scientists Norwegian bloggers Norwegian women scientists Australian women scientists Norwegian women bloggers European Research Council grantees University of Bergen faculty